A SmartNIC with Napatech Link-Capture™ Software can distribute frames to a maximum of 128 host buffers / streams in the host. Received frames can also be retransmitted to distribute traffic to multiple servers.
Overview
A SmartNIC with Napatech Link-Capture™ Software can be
configured to divide traffic received by the SmartNIC, in up to 128 host buffers with
dynamic segment size and 64 host buffers with static segment size, and in up to 128 or 64
streams in the host computer. This allows multiple threads or processes, running on
different CPU cores, to split the traffic processing. Once the streams are defined in the
system host, there are a variety of ways to specify the distribution of traffic to the host
buffers. These include: round-robin distribution, selection based on a variety of hash key
types, and filter selection.
Note: Dynamic segment size does not apply to the Intel® Programmable Acceleration Card with Intel® Arria®
10 GX FPGA.
Frames received on one or more network ports can be retransmitted to one network port on the same SmartNIC while delivering the same frames to the host. This local retransmission functionality can be used to daisy-chain SmartNICs avoiding multiple taps or to load-balance network processing between multiple servers.